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Murphy On The Death Of Connecticut’s Insurance Industry



A Republican American story notes, “A top Democratic lawmaker is sponsoring legislation to raise the state sales tax from 6.35 percent to 6.85 percent to help cities and towns.”

The top Democrat lawmaker is, of course, President Pro Tem of the State Senate Martin Looney, well positioned to sweep dedicated funds into the general fund, the graveyard of noble Democrat intentions.

The grand sweep has become a Connecticut tradition. The state failed to put money into its pension fund for state workers shortly after the General Assembly broke a bottle over the bow of its pension plan. Funds supposedly dumped into the pension fund found their way instead into the general fund – for the first three decades of the pension basket’s existence. The $127.7 billion hole in the fund ever since has served Democrats as a prime motivation for increasing taxes. “The debt from the public pensions,” the Yankee Institute reminds us, “amounts to $35,721 per person in Connecticut, the second highest per capita debt in the nation behind Alaska.” Excessive spending made possible by the sweeps and recurring tax increases are rarely mentioned by Democrat gatekeepers in the General Assembly for the same reason, one supposes, death is never mentioned in Emergency Care Units.

Looney is the most progressive legislator in Connecticut’s General Assembly. Just now, progressivism is the cat’s meow among Democrat legislators.

Prospective Democrat candidate for President Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts senator, is panting heavily in the pack led by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist. But U.S. Senator Kamala Harris may have vaulted close to the head of the socialist line when she announced the impending demise of the insurance industry. What need have we of an insurance industry after affordable insurance is made available to all? “Let’s eliminate all that,” Harris has said.

In promoting his unaffordable Affordable Care Act, former president Barack Obama memorably said, “If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it.” Obama’s unaffordable Affordable Care Act always was a stalking horse for a universal health care plan. Harris and the progressive cabal most assuredly do not want you to keep the insurance plan you like. If we do away with insurance altogether and replace the plan you like with universal health care run by the undemocratic and unelected administrative state, we can “eliminate all that” and leap happily into a future designed by the folks who have brought you a monopolistic Post Office and a dicey healthcare-for-all-veterans plan, both of which operate on the same administrative state model perfected by New World socialist Hugo Chavez of panic-stricken Venezuela.

According to a story in the Hartford Courant, “How ‘Medicare for All’ hits home,” members of Connecticut’s all Democrat U.S. Congressional Delegation are a touch ambivalent concerning Sanders' sweeping but honest plan to kill Connecticut’s insurance industry with one stroke. Some of them prefer to dispatch the culprit by means of a thousand cuts. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has made common cause with the death-by-a-thousand-cuts group. This artful strategy is a bit less wearing on politicians who hail from Connecticut, once known as the insurance capital of the world.

Here is Murphy, “the author of one of the half dozen Medicare-for-all proposals pending in Congress” on the proper way to dispatch the insurance industry in Connecticut. According to the Courant story, “Murphy views his proposal as an intermediate step on the way to a government run system – and could lead to the ‘slow death of private insurance,’ while providing ‘a little bit longer on-ramp to a single payer system.'”

Under Sanders' plan, the insurance industry in Connecticut steps directly to the guillotine. The Murphy plan provides a few steps to Connecticut’s imperiled insurance industry, possibly for reflection and repentance. “I think,” Murphy tells us, “it’s better to allow private insurers to compete against Medicare [For All]. I doubt that they can compete because they will always have a need to charge a premium to repay investors and the stock market, but let them figure that out.”

The truth is – and Murphy knows it – that the insurance industry cannot compete with a national monopoly  that defrays costs by furnishing the monopoly tax dollars drawn from the pockets of Connecticut insurance workers who will be unemployed once the progressives usher in their  universal health care Trojan Horse.

In this nearly empty glass, Murphy, “among the top 20 recipients of insurance industry campaign contributions in the U.S. Senate,” furnishes a drop of optimism. “Connecticut,” the Courant reminds us, “ranks first nationally in the percentage of people working for insurance carriers.” However, “Ending private insurance doesn’t necessarily mean insurance giants will fold.” They will simply become insurance midgets.

And the drop of optimism in the near empty insurance carrier glass?  Says Murphy, the new insurance overlord of Connecticut's still thriving insurance companies, “They could end up administering all these new [DC fabricated) policies. They’d make a whole lot of less money than they do today, but that’s probably not a bad thing for consumers.”

Right! As P. J. O’Rourke used to say, “If you think health care is expensive nowwait until you see what it costs when it's free.”



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